Man involved in gun standoff spared prison term

WEST CHESTER — The man who kept Willistown police at bay during a tense armed standoff at the apartment complex where he worked as a maintenance man has been spared a prison sentence for what authorities called his bizarre yet dangerous behavior.

But Jeffrey J. Stroman will remain under court supervision until well past the year 2025, with assurances from the judge who sentenced him that he will face a long stretch in prison should he run afoul of the law again.

“You are a danger to people, what with the way your brain is going,” Common Pleas Court Judge Jacqueline C. Cody told Stroman, 39, now of Middletown, Delaware County, at his sentencing hearing Friday, during which she placed him on 17 years of probation to run alongside a federal sentence of five years’ supervision. “This is very, very serious.

“If there are any violations you are going to jail for a very long time,” Cody said sternly, in ordering Stroman to give up all the guns police took from his home; to refrain from contacting a man he had threatened; and forbidding him from revisiting the Willistown apartment complex where the standoff occurred without official permission.

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“It has been a hard struggle the past year,” Stroman told Cody in acknowledging his guilt in the incident, which occurred in September 2011. “I am appreciative of the professional help I received.” But Stroman, who was diagnosed as suffering from bi-polar disorder and methamphetamine-induced paranoia after his arrest, maintained that his actions “were based on self-preservation.

“I still do believe that my life was in danger,” he told Cody.

On the evening of Sept. 5, 2011 into the early morning hours of Sept. 6, 2011, Stroman, after snorting meth and drinking a fifth of vodka, became convinced that the people he believed were out to harm him – including neighbors and a restaurant owner he thought was tied to the Mafia – were posed to act, according to court records.

Deciding to get the jump on them, Stroman first grabbed a 9mm handgun he owned and hid outside in the rain at the complex on West Chester Pike near the Ridley Creek State Park, He watched people “combing the woods around my apartment complex military style,” he later told a psychologist. “I assumed they’d either put a bullet in my head or kidnap me.”

After several hours, Stroman ran to the nearby Army Reserve Center where he climbed a fence and donned a camouflage outfit he found in a duffle bag there. Armed now with a 22-caliber rifle, he fired as many as 60 rounds into the air, hoping, he said, to attract police attention so that he would be safe from those who were after him.

Stroman said after his arrest that he was suspicious of a neighbor who he thought was stealing electricity from him to use in a marijuana growing operation. He had cut the electric box from his home, and taped a blanket over his window so he could not be seen, his parents later told the psychologist, Jeffrey Lazzaroff of Media.

The night of his arrest, the neighbor called police and said he could hear Stroman in the woods behind the complex screaming and firing his guns. He was threatening the neighbor and could be seen going back and forth to his apartment.

Willistown police called in the West Chester Area Emergency Response Team, which set up a perimeter in the area surrounding the apartments. After several hours, during which they tried to negotiate with Stroman, police were able to rush towards his home and take him into custody.

When they did, they found him carrying a 9 mm Luger handgun in a makeshift holster on his belt. They also found inside his apartment – where he live rent-free in exchange for maintenance work – a rifle that been modified with a silencer. He also told them that he had placed other weapons around the complex, including a .22 rile in a basement and a shotgun in a pump house. They also found an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle hidden inside the home. Several of the guns police retrieved were loaded at the time, according to an arrest affidavit by Willistown Officer William T. Murrin.

In February, Murrin, along with Officer Zachary Bullock and Sgt. Michael Lapira, was commended for their actions that night by the Willistown supervisors and Chief John Narcise.

Stroman was charged by Willistown police with carrying a firearm without a license, prohibited offensive weapons, terroristic threats, and related counts. He was also charged by federal authorities with trespass, receiving stolen property, and theft by unlawful taking. He pleaded guilty to the local charges in February, and was sentenced by U.S. District Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Hay this summer to five years probation.

Assistant District Attorney Alexander Gosfield, who handled the prosecution on the Willistown charges, said that his office had decided to go along with the sentence handed down by Hay because it included a strict regimen of mental health counseling and drug supervision. He said that although Stroman had some convictions for drug possession in the past, he had no record of violent crime.

According to court records, Stroman began using drugs when he was 15, including LSD, and continued until his arrest. He had been in and out of drug treatment facilities, never successfully completing any programs. From the age of 28, he snorted meth daily, sometimes substituting it with heroin.

“His issues arise from his mental health condition and drug use,” Gosfield told Cody. Had there been any actual harm during he incident or a record of past violence, he said, his office would “be asking the court to send him to prison for as long as it could. Instead, he asked her to give him a long probation period so he would be under the court’s jurisdiction.

Stroman’s attorney, Stephen Schukraft of Media, on the other hand pleaded with Cody not to put him on probation for “a zillion years.

“He is looking forward to putting this behind him,” Schukraft told the judge. “You and I know that is going to be hard.”

In sentencing Stroman, Cody, a former county prosecutor and supervising judge with the county’s Drug Court, expressed both an appreciation for his dedication to the treatment he had been receiving and a warning that she did not take his behavior lightly.

“You messed up your brain,” she said. While he did not harm anyone, “you could have because you were convinced that you were doing the right thing. But you can’t be around firearms, and you can’t be around drugs for the rest of your life.”